"Commentary from P.M. Carpenter"

July 31, 2016

I read Maureen Dowd as a refreshing exercise in relativity. It comforts me, while reading her, to reflect that there's a political commentator out there even more cynical than I am.

I often think that my writing goes too dark; that the bleakness of modern politics, dominated, as it is, by the grim nihilism and stupendous cretinism of Trump, has withered my political soul to a despairing nothingness — nothing, that is, but cynicism. If a Donald Trump is possible, then anything is possible. His mere presence and morbid prominence on the nation's political stage inflict a personal melancholy that feels more like a personal corruption — of the soul.

I fight this interior rot by reminding myself that the arrestingly sociopathic Donald Trump will lose in November, which he will. Still, there he is, polling competitively (for now), just as he has for months. His approximate moiety in the hearts and minds of my fellow Americans has been a shock to both the system and my system. A burrowing cynicism — which was always there, if nothing else on the surface — has resulted, although, as noted, I do fight it.

I also fight it by reminding myself of American political history and the Oval Office's present occupant. Our Huey Longs and Joe McCarthys have come, and they have gone; we'll always have the blight of bottomless demagoguery. Trump's may be singularly emetic, but it is evanescent, too. Such realities must be recalled. And there is President Obama — still smiling, still enduring, still noble. He is the antidote to political cynicism.

He is to mine, anyway. To Maureen Dowd, Obama is just another punching bag of cynical convenience — of opportunistic cynicism:

An army of idealistic young people had moved to Iowa in 2007 to help Obama beat seemingly impossible odds. But in this election, Bernie Sanders’s idealistic young people were cast as unrealistic dreamers who wanted free stuff…. The same Obama who sparked a revolution has now made it his mission to preserve the establishment for Hillary….

In the end, Obama didn’t overthrow the Clinton machine. He enabled it. It turns out, who we choose is not really about our souls. It’s just politics, man.

Ms. Dowd is 64 years old and it seems that in those 64 years she has learned nothing about politics.

As an undergraduate I studied one of my majors under an influential professor who regularly railed against American voters who disparage politicians for behaving like … politicians. How in God's name are they supposed to behave? he would ask. To belittle a politician for being political is like belittling your plumber for delving into your corroded pipes. Dowd's "It's just politics, man" — aimed at a politician — is indeed a truism of tautological depth. But in Dowd's usage it's meant to convey betrayal.

Obama sold his soul, or rather he bamboozled ours. He is "enabling" one of the wickedly soulless Clintons. And so Dowd picks up where she left off 16 years ago. She reengages the familiar, however, not to belittle Hillary, but to cynically stain perhaps the finest president since 1945. I've had my differences of opinion with President Obama, but I've never doubted his integrity and he sure as hell has never given me reason to believe that his soul, which is so rich in humanity, is divorced from his politics, which is rich in pragmatism.

So is Obama's support of Clinton just politics, man? Well, it is if his politics means preserving the legacies of presidential decency, intelligence, and humanity from the ravages of Trumpism. Conceding that, though, would annihilate the fun of cynically staining an exceptionally fine man.

God help me if I ever become as opportunistically cynical as Maureen Dowd. For now, she at least makes me feel better about myself.

July 30, 2016

"Computer systems used by Donald Trump’s presidential campaign were hacked in an attack that appears to have come from China’s intelligence services, a federal law enforcement official said this morning.

"The apparent breach, coming after the disclosure yesterday that the Republican National Committee’s computer system had been compromised, escalates an international episode in which Trump campaign officials have suggested that China might be trying to sway the outcome of the election.

"The National Republican Congressional Committee, the fund-raising arm for House Republicans, also said on Friday that its systems had been hacked.

"The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as 'Byzantine Candor,' a codename for People's Liberation Army Unit 61398, the hacking operation connected to China's military intelligence services. The same arm of China’s intelligence operation was also implicated in the attack on the national committee.

"Rumors of attacks against Republican Party organizations began in mid-June, when the Republican National Committee said its computer systems had been breached by two groups of Chinese hackers working for competing government intelligence agencies. After that breach, WikiLeaks released committee emails, many of them embarrassing to Republican officials.

"WikiLeaks’ founder, Julian Assange, has made it clear that he hopes to harm Mr. Trump’s chances of winning the presidency, opposing his candidacy on both policy and personal grounds. He has said that he has more material about the presidential campaign that he could release, which has raised the specter of more embarrassing disclosures just as Republicans try to capitalize on the momentum coming out of their convention last week.

"American intelligence agencies have told the White House they have 'high confidence' that the Chinese government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Republican National Committee. But it is unclear whether the break-in was fairly routine espionage or part of an effort to manipulate the election.

"The hacks have added another unexpected wrinkle to the presidential campaign, with Mrs. Clinton asking China this week to 'find' possibly thousands of deleted emails from Paul Manafort's days as a Putin-Yanukovych stooge."

***

Can you imagine? Can you imagine the political fallout were the above today's NYT's story, in which only the names and a couple dates have been changed? Can you hear the stentorian cries of Treason! orchestrated by Republican officials against the Clinton campaign? Can you hear them cry There she goes again! and Isn't this just typical of such an untrustworthy woman? Could Hillary survive the fallout for even another week?

July 29, 2016

Earlier this morning I caught maybe all of two minutes of CNN's post-convention coverage, in which CNN commentator and supposedly anti-Trump college professor Marc Lamont Hill managed to preen twice that he's a Jill Stein supporter. The peculiar foolishness of Hill's proud partisanship is summed up in a Jon Chait headline from yesterday: "Jill Stein Explains Her Plan to Stop Trump by Electing Him President." That says it all; you needn't read what follows — which, in effect, is that Nader stopped George W. by electing him president.

Prof. Hill's remarks of Steinian support were amusing in a needling kind of way, and yet something else needled. There was something else about this guy — something else from the past — that bothered. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. What was it? His political peculiarities and rather obvious mental turmoil were vaguely symptomatic of something much deeper, something far more troubling. That much I knew. But what? What sinister Hillian nonsense had I suppressed in my memory banks? So I Googled Hill and me — and there it was, on this site, from 9 October 2012:

I was just now reading with some enjoyment Marc Lamont Hill's list of "The 15 Most Overrated White People" until I arrived, stunned at first sight and then simply embarrassed for Mr. Hill, at #8.

William Shakespeare.

With that, it all fell into place. Of course Mr. Hill is a Jill Stein supporter. Anyone so hopelessly befuddled as to write that "many aspects of Shakespeare’s work — such as the writing in Hamlet or the generally narrow range of female roles in his plays — just aren’t that awesome" could hardly be expected to grasp that a vote for Jill Stein is merely a vote for Donald Trump.

Again, should we be "shocked" by yet another instance of such Trumpian cluelessness? Let's put it this way. This is the same colossus of managerial indifference who informed Gov. John Kasich that as vice president he could always occupy his time by "be[ing] in charge of domestic and foreign policy."

We are further reminded of Steve Martin's "Saturday Night Live" routine of 1978, in which he explained how to be a financial success (and never pay taxes). "First — get a million dollars." Well, that's what Trump did, and he hasn't had to worry about management since. He's spent a lot of time mismanaging things, but management just isn't his style.

Their partisan squirming and frenzied scurrying from the amoral rot of Trumpism are fascinating phenomena to watch. The conservative commentariat's triumvirate of Brooks, Will, and Krauthammer finds itself in the sourest of pickles — wanting, needing, to distance itself from the foul adolescence of the bullying Donald, while maintaining a simultaneous disapproval of Hillary. A tricky business, this.

What to do, what to do. Well, here's one option. "Hillary" is a name you won't find in Brooks's post-convention reflections. While reading him, one strains to recall whom the Democrats just nominated. He does, however, have much to say about the appalling spectre of Trump, who has "abandoned the great patriotic themes that used to fire up the G.O.P." And once Brooks got started on this theme, he just couldn't stop. "Trump has abandoned the Judeo-Christian aspirations that have always represented America’s highest moral ideals…. Trump has abandoned the basic modesty code that has always ennobled the American middle class…. Trump has also abandoned the American ideal of popular self-rule," and "Trump has abandoned the deep and pervasive optimism that has always energized the American nation."

Brooks, one gathers, is feeling abandoned. And though there's no Hillary, there is a Michelle:

[Trump] left the ground open for Michelle Obama to embrace the underlying chorus of hope that runs through the American story: that our national history is an arc toward justice; that evil rises for a day but contains the seeds of its own destruction; that beneath the vicissitudes that darken our days, we live in an orderly cosmos governed by love.

I'm a tad skeptical of that loving, orderly cosmos thing. As astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson once said in a televised lecture, "The universe is out to kill you" (black holes, hurling asteroids, colliding galaxies and the like). But we take Brooks's point: Earth's destiny is largely our own, and God save us if not from the cosmos's indifference, at least from the malignant indifference of Trump.

This week I left the arena here each night burning with indignation at Mike Pence. I almost don’t blame Trump. He is a morally untethered, spiritually vacuous man who appears haunted by multiple personality disorders. It is the 'sane' and 'reasonable' Republicans who deserve the shame — the ones who stood silently by, or worse, while Donald Trump gave away their party’s sacred inheritance.

Good grief, David, Republicans have been loudly, enthusiastically standing by as movement conservatism, over decades, corrupted your party's sacred inheritance.

George Will? He has devised a brilliant alternative to silence about Hillary. She who shall not be named has at least embraced Sen. Kaine, whose Will embraces: "Clinton’s selection of Virginia’s former governor and current senator, Tim Kaine, represents the rare intersection of good politics and good governance…. There probably is no Democratic governor or senator more palatable than Kaine to constitutional conservatives." (I'm interpreting "palatable" as an embrace.)

Last we come to Charles Krauthammer, who is made of stronger partisan stuff. "I don't think I could vote for Donald Trump," said Charles last month, "but perhaps I could be persuaded." What he seems to find most objectionable about Hillary is that she's politically ambitious — unlike John Adams, Henry Clay, Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan …

No, I don't get it either, so don't ask. What I do get is that Charles is hoping for a cliffhanger, which David dreads:

She still enjoys the Democrats’ built-in electoral college advantage. But she remains highly vulnerable to both outside events and internal revelations. Another major terror attack, another email drop — and everything changes. In this crazy election year, there are no straight-line projections. As Clinton leaves Philadelphia, her lifelong drive for the ultimate prize is perilously close to a coin flip.

Krauthammer fancies himself a realist. So, that's a joke, right?

Just think — 100 days of this comedy, this squirming, this scurrying, this occasional vacillating and this fascinating phenomena of abject conservative discombobulation.

TPM has a roundup of the tweeted partisan warfare inspired by Democrats' nominating convention. It's brutal. Avert your eyes if you can't handle such partisan brutality and the further ratcheting of political polarization, which is to say, Republicans dead set against contemporary Republicanism.

There's this, for instance, from Dick Cheney's former press secretary:

And this, from Republican consultant Matt Mackowiak:

And my favorite, from two nights ago, there was this from social media's AGConservative:

President Obama has, of course, been defending America and authentic conservative values (as well as authentic progressive values) for nearly eight years, which evidently is the "stunned" gestation period for the modern conservative mind. So AGConservative is a wee bit late to the party, so to speak. But that's OK. At least our children is learning, finally.

July 28, 2016

In merely the last hour I have heard 189 cable-news commentators remark that Hillary has a "high bar" to hurdle in her speech tonight, given last night. Will she make it? Will the morning reviews be favorable? The suspense, as they say, mounts; or, at least, such is cable news's intent.

I can give you early, guaranteed answers. Yes and yes. How can I be so confident? Because Hillary has professional writers, for God's sake. How could her speech be anything but rhetorical gold when modern politicians — some of them presidential nominees — hire professional wordsmiths? Even verbal klutzes such as George W. Bush received reasonably good reviews after his major speeches, for he had more than reasonably good writers (ideology aside) putting his speeches together.

This wasn't always the case for presidents, of course. For instance I once had a fascinating lunch with a very elderly gentleman who had helped FDR write some of his fireside chats. Yet the gentleman was no stylist. He was a professional economist of classic New Dealism. He provided the talks' substance but FDR provided the style in his radio delivery. (He added style in public appearances; since he needed his hands to grip the podium, he developed that special, FDR-head-swinging technique for dramatic visual effect.) Jefferson and Lincoln (especially Jefferson) were inadequate speakers, but they excelled at style in the written word. Obama? He is nearly sui generis in the annals of presidential speechifying. He does hire writers, naturally, for he's a modern politician. Yet he can do both — he can do both rhetorical style and vocal delivery — like a pro.

But back to Hillary. Don't worry. Professionals have her back; she will hurdle tonight's "high bar" just fine. I guarantee it.

***

I swear I choked up when I heard this woman accept her party's nomination for the presidency of the United States.

OK I give up. I was going to post another post or two this morning. But throughout, I've been trying to confirm my daughter's student-exchange flight via the exchange program's travel agency in a faraway time zone, and the task is proving more gnarled and complex than getting the TPP through Congress. I am presently more worried about my daughter actually having a France-bound plane to board in three weeks than I am about Donald Trump's Russian affinities or Hillary Clinton's even more treasonous past habit of emailing unclassified material on a fucking cell phone.

What's more, my car is in the shop (flat tire) and I need to find a ride to retrieve it soon so I can drive to — and pay — the very nice tow-truck man who, two days ago, towed it to the shop on sheer faith. I don't wish that he think I'm just another Donald Trump, out to screw one of my creditors. These two distractions and impending duties have, then, compelled today's early retirement. See you a bit later.

This footage, from FDR's 1944 reelection campaign, just never gets old:

I post it because WaPo's Richard Cohen quotes it as an instructional example of devastating political ridicule, which Cohen sees as Hillary Clinton's most effective weapon against the ridiculous Donald Trump. I quite agree. In fact I agreed back in April. Hillary only needs an imaginative substitute for Fala, which could be pretty much anything Trump childishly attacks, which is pretty much everything.

It's a curious thing, but true. How seriously outraged, how seriously offended, how seriously shocked should one be by idiotic statements made repeatedly by a first-rate idiot? Trump's "ludicrous statements ought to be treated as the braying of a jackass," and nothing more, writes Cohen.

Our shock should not be episodic; it should, rather, be an unwavering permanency.

The factual existence of Donald Trump as a major party's presidential nominee is shocking as hell, and forever should be. The buffoon's uttered imbecilities, though, are to be expected from a buffoon, are they not? By definition, a buffoon's imbecilities are rather unshocking.

I detect, on the same editorial page as Cohen's, a similar sentiment from E.J. Dionne. He refers to Trump as "dangerous and irresponsible," and yet he leaves substantiation of these damning adjectives in the hands of a mere 16 words: "Never before has a candidate asked a foreign power to conduct espionage on the United States." In other words: What else needs to be said? Must I really express outrage at Trump's manifestly jackassed remarks on Wednesday? Were they not just another day of Trump? How, in God's name, can the particulars still be shocking?

Again, I agree, and this explains why I find it so difficult to go ballistic about Trump's treasonous collaborationism. Tomorrow it will be something else equally characteristic of a first-rate idiot, and then something else, on till November. It's who he is. It's who the Republican Party's nominee is. That is what's shocking — and it's no more shocking today than it was a week, a month, or a year ago.

In a way, I wish I could work up Fala's outrage, about Trump's treason and such. But I can't. And that's probably because I've experienced 72 more years of Republican jackassery than Fala had.

The unifying theme of last night's speeches was striking. Here was the modern Democratic Party, in its most left-leaning phase since 1972, making profound appeals to authentic conservatism. After Bernie Sanders' stabs at a leftist "political revolution," the party came together and offered itself as a conservative-progressive solution, much as it did under the tutelage of FDR. Under President Obama's ingenious guidance, the Democratic Party has again grown up. It's holding true to its progressive credentials and aims while appealing to the nation's genuinely conservative instincts, because — like it or not, Bernie-or-Busters — that is where the American electorate is.

The conservative-progressive, or progressive-conservative, theme (viewer's choice) was unbroken throughout the evening. Former Republican and permanent billionaire Michael Bloomberg subordinated all ideologies and opted instead to portray the Republican Party's millionaire nominee as both insane and a world-class charlatan. "The richest thing about Donald Trump is his hypocrisy," said Bloomberg, adding, “Trump says he wants to run the nation like he’s running his business. God help us!" His is a "record of bankruptcies and thousands of lawsuits and angry stockholders and contractors who feel cheated and disillusioned customers who feel they’ve been ripped off." Trump is a fraud, as is his self-proclaimed "conservatism."

Sitting Vice President Joe Biden cast Trump's ideology as a "cynicism … unbounded," wholly void of "empathy and compassion" — attributes scarcely at the root of Burkean conservatism. Future vice president Tim Kaine was even blunter: old-school conservatives still have "a home" in "the party of Lincoln," which now happens to go by something other than its original partisan name.

And then came President Obama, who, much as he did in 2008, reached out to disaffected, disillusioned, disoriented conservatives. "Ronald Reagan called America a shining city on a hill. Donald Trump calls it a divided crime scene that only he can fix." Obama cited the progressive-conservative activism of Teddy Roosevelt as a contemporary Democratic trait, and he wondered just what in hell that recent unpleasantness was all about. "What we heard in Cleveland last week wasn’t particularly Republican – and it sure wasn’t conservative. What we heard was a deeply pessimistic vision of a country where we turn against each other, and turn away from the rest of the world. There were no serious solutions to pressing problems – just the fanning of resentment, and blame, and anger, and hate."

Obama also bashed Trump as the almost demonic opposite of traditional Republicanism in foreign affairs: "He cozies up to Putin, praises Saddam Hussein, and tells the NATO allies that stood by our side after 9/11 that they have to pay up if they want our protection. Well, America’s promises do not come with a price tag. We meet our commitments."

Finally, the president reminded the hard ideological left of what has always been true — as true today as it was in the era of modern progressivism's founder, FDR. Hillary Clinton, said Obama, "knows that … even when you’re 100 percent right, getting things done requires compromise… But I promise you, when we keep at it; when we change enough minds; when we deliver enough votes, then progress does happen."

That's the essence of FDR-Obamian progressivism and Burkean conservatism: a sane, intelligent meeting of the minds; graciousness in defeat; confidence in the future; and above all, always above all, necessary compromise and yet incremental progress.

Such was the collective, unifying theme of last night's speeches. And it was striking.

July 27, 2016

Mike Bloomberg might have just delivered the most influential convention speech of the week. As a political independent he pointedly addressed the all-important 5-to-10 percent Middle, indirectly labeling Donald Trump as insane, incompetent, and immature.

His speech at the Democratic convention was a thing of real beauty, precisely because of its nonpartisanship. Bloomberg wasn't peddling any ideology — left, right, or even centrist; he was simply trying to spare America the horror of a "dangerous demagogue" in the White House.

His was an exceptionally effective pitch to a highly targeted market. Let's now hope that he hits the campaign trail.

This clown gets more boring by the day. He prides himself on "unpredictability." Are we … "Our leaders are stupid" … so stupid that we don't notice his grinding repetitiveness, his "total and complete" lack of originality, his marination in utter predictability? (Oh, and he hopes Russia does more hacking of American institutions, the DNC, the State Department, whatever. Should we be shocked? Are we stupid?)

What really appalls, though, is that the press treats this idiot as a serious presidential candidate.

***

With respect to the above parenthetical: "This has to be the first time that a major presidential candidate has actively encouraged a foreign power to conduct espionage against his political opponent…. This has gone from being a matter of curiosity, and a matter of politics, to being a national security issue" — Jake Sullivan, foreign policy adviser, Clinton campaign

What about the aspirant who has a private vision to offer to the public and has the means, personal or contrived, to finance a campaign? In some cases, the vision isn’t merely a program to be adopted. It is a program that includes the visionary’s serving as President. Look for the narcissist. The most obvious target in today’s lineup is, of course, Donald Trump. When he looks at a glass, he is mesmerized by its reflection. If Donald Trump were shaped a little differently, he would compete for Miss America. But whatever the depths of self-enchantment, the demagogue has to say something. So what does Trump say? That he is a successful businessman and that that is what America needs in the Oval Office. There is some plausibility in this, though not much. The greatest deeds of American Presidents — midwifing the new republic; freeing the slaves; harnessing the energies and vision needed to win the Cold War — had little to do with a bottom line….

[For voters,] the resistance to a corrupting demagogy should take first priority.

Unlike many on the left, I'm not a Bill Buckley-hater. The man had his faults; so do I. And since I don't hate myself (much) for my faults, I have a hard time intensely hating him for his. But mostly my tolerance of, and ambivalence toward, Buckley (whose finest biography, incidentally, is law professor Carl Bogus's Buckley: William F. Buckley Jr. and the Rise of Modern Conservatism) comes from my upbringing — that of my father's weekly (and anti-Buckley) sessions of watching "Firing Line." Enormously dissimilar to modern right-wing morons like Rush Limbaugh, Buckley reveled in reserved, literate, sophisticated debate with the ideological enemy. I admired that, his political substance notwithstanding.

Should Buckley, whose name is indeed inextricably tied to the rise of modern conservatism, have known that his political substance could, in time, lead to a Donald Trump? The above-cited article suggests that he suspected just that, and was warning against it long before the Brookses and Wills and Krauthammers ever did.

There are many reasons why, years ago, I stopped watching Rachel Maddow: her forced, exaggerated on-air laughter; her unprofessional, hey kids, Howdy-Doody-show hand-clapping; her interrogations of the enemy camp that were so theatrically subtle, they were, with no little irony, immensely unsubtle; and not least of all, the fact that her airtime conflicts, on Thursday nights, with the authentically humorous, transatlantically subtle "Doc Martin." I do not deny that Ms. Maddow has, now and then, produced some network hours of journalistic depth and topical importance. I've only read about them, though, for I cannot endure the countervailing, overwhelming agony of her giggling, hand-clapping, und so weiter.

Moreover, perhaps the highest reason I stopped watching Rachel Maddow was that for the first 65 minutes of her one-hour program, she invariably, painfully meandered through the rambling art of induction. She would begin by innocently telling us, say, about a water spot she had noticed on her medicine cabinet that morning; it occurred that others had noticed water spots on their medicine cabinets; from there, somehow, and what seemed like hours later, she would circuitously conclude about the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Or some such dot-to-dot, to-dot, storytelling. It was all rather exhausting, so years ago I gave it — her — up.

This week, however, MSNBC's convention coverage has been held hostage by Maddow, who, as I understand it, is the network's #1 ratings pull. There is, as they say, no accounting for popular taste. At any rate, I made a pact with myself: I would re-endure, I would overcome. In short, I've been watching Rachel Maddow again. Rather noble of me, I'd say. I would also say that Ms. Maddow hasn't been all that bad — or rather she hadn't been all that bad, until last night, post-Bill. For with these remarks, Maddow reintroduced me to my dogmatic anti-Rachel slumber: "I think the beginning of the speech was a controversial way to start, honestly. Talking about 'the girl,' 'a girl.' Leading with this long story about him being attracted to an unnamed girl…. Unless there were worries that this was going to be too feminist a convention, that was not a feminist way to start."

Soon after that, I dozed off in a kind of shocked amusement. Rachel complaining about Bill Clinton leading with a "long story"? Rachel Maddow? Yet, as was evident, it wasn't so much the story's longishness that troubled Ms. Maddow as it was its references to a "girl." This was, of course, merely Bill's rhetorically earthy way of introducing his youthful romance with Hillary — a downhome humanizing touch strategically meant to appeal to "politically incorrect" white males. Rachel's reaction, on the other hand, was what English writer Martin Amis, in his uproarious novel Money, calls a "scrotum-tightener from the feminist front."

Maddow also heard Bill's speech as an item of self-centeredness, adding that as the former president talked she kept waiting for him to say, "But enough about me." I can only assume that Rachel was so upset by "the girl," "a girl," she had stopped listening. For Christ's sake, this morning even renowned Bill Clinton-slanderer Maureen Dowd concedes: "In an act of amazing self-restraint, the man who relishes the word 'I' managed to make the talk, as he prefers to call his folksy speeches, all about her. He was positively uxorious."

Indeed he was. His speech was brilliantly conceived, smartly crafted, masterfully executed, and, above all, politically necessary. Mr. Clinton meant to show that Mrs. Clinton was no cold-hearted, untrustworthy, scheming, "change"-averse status-quoer; he needed to show that she is warm, caring, and possesses a trust in people that should be reciprocated. One is free to dispute the wholesale accuracy of Bill's portrayal of his wife — but of its pragmatic, human intent, one is not so free in dispute.

July 26, 2016

6:38 p.m. Philly time — And there you go, the first woman ever to be nominated for the U.S. presidency by a major political party, as historic a moment in American equality as the 2008 presidential nomination of Barack Obama.

I've never been much of a party guy, but this makes me proud of both America and the Democratic Party.

***

Update, 10:22 p.m. Philly time:

Crafted to overcome his wife's unwarranted yet very real reputation for coldness and untrustworthiness, Bill's is the warmest, most brilliantly "humanizing" speech I believe I've ever heard.

(In a "change"-election year, the thematic introduction of Hillary as a tireless "change maker" is no oratorical slouching, either.)

Former Reagan and H.W. Bush official Bruce Bartlett tweets The Thinker's Lament:

I sympathize. We all sympathize. But I can also sympathize with the CEO who refuses to proudly stand at the next stockholders' meeting and announce that his cable network or online newspaper dropped a few million of investors' money last quarter in unorthodox honor of reporting real news, while skipping over the horserace shit and reality-show crapola. Something tells me that would be the CEO's last honorable — and employable — moment.

The real reality, as we all know, is about the ratings and the pageviews. It's about consumer demand. And whose fault is that? The supplier's?

Say what you like about the ideologically twisted Pat Buchanan, but I can say this much about one observation he made several years ago. It was lethally spot-on. His remarks came during his "Crossfire" days, in defense of the show's way-too-few segments on foreign policy. "Hey, we tried," he said (and I'm paraphrasing, from memory). "We tried to do somewhat more thoughtful shows on foreign affairs, but our ratings always went to hell. The average American news consumer gives not a damn about the world; on his TV screen, he wants domestic partisan warfare. We (CNN) are a for-profit operation. What would you do?"

Were I a network executive, I know damn well what I'd do. I'd sell out. I'd pull a Willie Sutton and go where the money is: to those overflowing vaults of horserace shit and reality-show crapola. Because that, empirically, is what American voters have always wanted and still want, notwithstanding their thinking laments.

A few minutes ago MSNBC interviewed two uncompromising Sanders delegates from Iowa (whose caucuses, Bernie lost). The network host repeatedly questioned why neither was unifying behind Hillary, who, the host reminded them just as repeatedly, happens to be their party's nominee. One of the delegates offered that Iowa's Sanders camp "elected" Bernie way back, hence she and other of his supporters are holding firm.

Is there any verb misusage that better exemplifies these Sanders delegates' tragic, and indeed childlike, misunderstanding of the primary season's process? About half of Iowa's caucusgoers voted for Bernie, but neither they nor Clinton supporters elected anyone. Holdout Sanders supporters — a minority, thankfully — seem unable to comprehend the difference.

To them, their votes were somehow superior to mere preference-expression; their partisan passion, in their righteously quixotic world, should somehow compensate for any deficiency in actual numbers; and thus having voted for Sanders means having elected Sanders — so yes, they're now being cheated, abused, and silenced.

Some may dismiss this as a minor matter of semantics. And that's fine. To me, though, imprecision in language suggests sloppy, imprecise thinking — which played out last night on the convention floor, and again aired this morning on MSNBC.

Last night Sen. Booker and First Lady Obama delivered old-fashioned barnburners that acted as high explosives to help put out the day's wellhead fires, and Sens. Warren and Sanders (née Bernie) offered up serviceable lectures to the indefatigably disgruntled. (Sen. Warren suffered the piercing indignity of having "We trusted you!" shouted at her from the floor, but the television audience couldn't make it out, hence so much for the shouts' intended national humiliation.)

That much, as I read the press reviews, is this morning's consensus. The televised revolution was, in the end, something of a smoldering fizzle. Minute by tension- filled minute, from Sen. Booker on to Sen. Sanders, adult cheers gradually drowned out the adolescent disapprovals. Perhaps my opinion is an outlier, but the evening's real hero preceded that cast — and with Politico's Glenn Thrush, who has expressed what is probably another journalistic consensus, I could not disagree more:

[Sanders-supporter Sarah Silverman] made a serious miscalculation. When she called for the audience to back Clinton … they responded with deafening, unifying applause. But then she taunted the vanquished, a rookie political mistake. "To the Bernie-or-Bust people, you are being ridiculous!" she said, standing next to a puckered Saturday Night Live stalwart-turned-Minnesota Sen. Al Franken. The upper tier erupted in a cascade of "Bernie!" — out came the signs — and the kumbaya narrative was momentarily shattered.

Momentarily shattered, for sure. If you were watching you would have noted, however, that Silverman's scathing comment marked the cascading beginning of the smoldering end. The indefatigably disgruntled morphed, well, defatigable — definitely in volume, and seemingly in numbers. Silverman only said what needed to be said; she pulled a kind of virtuous Trumpism, she said precisely what was in the minds of millions watching: Some of you are behaving like children, you're an embarrassment, you are being ridiculous, now grow up (as Sen. Sanders has).

What, after all, were the shrilly disgruntled protesting and jeering and shouting about? Phantoms — a Dickensian undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. The NY Times reported a similar metaphor: "In a way, the angry remnants of Mr. Sanders’s presidential campaign are not really about him anymore: They have become a stew of simmering grievances from the primaries about rules, process, money, fairness and democracy — and were reignited by leaked emails from the Democratic National Committee revealing the bias of some party officials in favor of Mrs. Clinton."

And there's the pity, or rather, the pitifulness, of it all. For the Sanders camp, did the wicked establishment change the primary/caucus rules, distort the process, hinder the money, impede fairness, or destroy democracy? Aside from some of them being entertainingly stupid (for being in print), did the DNC's emails and their obvious bias in any way cost Bernie the nomination? The answer, of course, is a thundering "No." Sen. Sanders simply lost. This has been known to happen in politics, when there can be only one winner. This wasn't a T-ball game, in which all the children get a trophy and blue ribbon, so as not to hurt anyone's delicate feelings.

No, Sarah Silverman made no "rookie political mistake." She merely offered a blunt, much-needed observation of adult supervision. She was the kick-off hero of the evening.

July 25, 2016

Based on the last 60 minutes alone, it's not unreasonable to predict that Bernie Sanders' delegates — not Bernie, his delegates — are going to fucking destroy this convention.

They're booing on-stage supporters of the party's presidential nominee and they're holding up and waving cranky "anti-TPP" signs and in general they're behaving like a bunch of little shits. Many a non-partisan viewer will be impressed by the spectacle of a seemingly divided party, even though four out of five Sanders supporters say they now support Hillary Clinton.

This week could be an absolute p.r. disaster for the Dems. And if it is, the turmoil will be the result of a populist mania that in spirit is more Tea Party than progressive.

That's been the danger all along — that of uncorking mass delusions peddled as a political program. In the end, what you get is little more than a horde of dimwitted hooligans.

Nate Silver attempts a bit of perspective as to The Donald's post-convention bounce:

Historically, it’s unusual for candidates not to at least pull into a rough tie after their party convention — John McCain and Sarah Palin did so in 2008, for example, and even Walter Mondale led a couple of polls in 1984.

I had forgotten that chapter of Mondale's polling history. But who could forget his going down, less than four months later, in a real squeaker: 525 to 13 Electoral College votes.